Top Domains in Google Search Results

Aside from Google, Party City, Halloween Costumes and Pinterest top the list.

Factoring in keyword search volume (~10M searches per month), Halloween Costumes tops the list, followed by niche sellers. Major retailers Amazon, Walmart, and Target rank near the bottom.

Top 10 Halloween Share-of-Voice Leaders

Google Rankings

Niche sellers outranked big retailers in our research.

RANK

DOMAIN

AVG RANK

UNIQ KWS

UNIQ URLS

1.

halloweencostumes.com

5.8

474

294

2.

partycity.com

6.4

489

558

3.

spirithalloween.com

10.4

434

218

4.

halloweenexpress.com

11.9

459

263

5.

amazon.com

12.5

509

691

6.

buycostumes.com

13.0

420

225

7.

walmart.com

14.2

444

323

8.

target.com

14.6

462

597

9.

costumesupercenter.com

15.0

364

207

10.

ebay.com

15.6

249

233

11.

disneystore.com

18.1

96

66

12.

costumeexpress.com

19.4

305

166

13.

wholesalehalloweencostumes.com

19.6

332

173

Insights

Party City, Amazon, Walmart, Target and eBay all have similar counts of keywords and urls, meaning they have a unique page for almost every keyword. This could be explained by the buildout of niche taxonomy pages, like 'batman costumes', 'frozen costumes', etc. Some sites like Amazon and Party City have more urls than keywords, meaning they have more than 1 result appearing for each keyword.

Content Health

Amazon scored the highest and Target the lowest. Low scores are attributed to product availability (out of stock), weak descriptions, number of images, and number of reviews. All in all, it's a bit surprising to see the scores so low for all of them.

Conclusion

So what do we make of all this?

The specialty halloween sites trump the giants when it comes to search discovery and findability. Their laser product focus and attention to SEO probably explains that. As a wisecolleaguetold me, 'it's not that they (the specialty sites) have any better (SEO) tricks, they just take the time to do it right'. I guess that is the lesson for the big sites.